History of the Red Cross - British anniversary exhibition (1870-2020)

Red Cross medical dispatcher, 1914

Red Cross Museum and Archives

In 1859, businessman Henry Dunant  from Switzerland was travelling in northern Italy when he witnessed the aftermath of a bloody battle between Franco-Sardinian and Austrian forces near the village of Solferino. The fighting had left c40,000 troops dead or injured, and neither the armies nor the locals were equipped to deal with the situation; poor Dunant understood why.

Dunant started to advocate for the establishment of national relief organisations made up of trained volunteers who could offer assistance to war-wounded soldiers, on both sides. In 1862 Dunant wrote a book called A Memory of Solferino, to strengthen his plan. The following year, Dunant was part of a Swiss-based committee that put together the organisation. Thus the Red Cross formally became the network centred in Switzer­land, with worldwide divisions that provided assist­an­ce to victims of disasters, armed conflict and health crises.

In late 1863, the first national society was started in the German state of Württemberg. 

The Swiss government invited the governments of Europe's countries & 3 other countries, to attend a top diplomatic conference. 16 countries sent a total of 26 delegates to Geneva. The meeting was presided over by Gen Guillaume Henri Dufour at Geneva's Town Hall in Aug 1864, the conference adopting the first Geneva Convention for the amelioration of the condition of the wounded in armies in the field. Reps of 12 states signed the convention.

The British Red Cross was formed in 1870, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

This International Committee of the Red Cross adopted the symbol of a red cross on a white background, the opposite of the Swiss flag, to identify the neutral medical workers on the battlefield. In the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire began using a red crescent as its emblem, in place of a red cross. 

Note that Dunant was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1867, and resigned from the Red Cross. Nonetheless in 1901 he received the first-ever Nobel Peace Prize because without him, the Red Cross, the supreme humanitarian achievement of the C19th, would probably have never been undertaken.” 

  

ICRC founders: Gustave Moynier, Louis Appia, Guillaume-Henri Dufour, Henry Dunant and Théodore Maunoir. Founded 1863 in Geneva.

Credit: ICRC

At the end of the American Civil War,  Clara Barton aka Angel of the Battlefield received perm­ission from Pres Abraham Lincoln to operate the Missing Sold­iers Office, to help locate missing troops for their families and friends. Within several years, Barton and her small staff received thousands of letters asking for help and were able to track down 22,000 men. Barton travelled to Europe to recup­er­ate from years of tireless war-work, and while there, she learned about the Red Cross movement for the first time.

Back home, Barton started a long campaign to get the U.S to ratify the 1864 Geneva Convention; it did so in 1882, a year after Barton founded the American Red Cross. In 1898, the American Red Cross aided in war for the first time when it gave medical care to soldiers in the Spanish-American War. 

Although we think of deadly war as a C20th development, relief societies and armed conflicts were increasing in numbers in the late C19th: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Russo-Turkish War of 1875-1878 and the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Mehzebin Adam, curator of the British Red Cross Museum and Arch­ives, is marking its 150th anniversary with a fine online exhibit­ion called 150 Voices. It does not assess the effectiveness of the Society; the exhibition’s role is to recall how Dunant urged all nations to create volunt­eer groups to provide imp­artial relief to the sick and wounded. The soc­iety he establ­ished was based upon the rules of the Geneva Con­vent­ion and joined the global Red Cross movement to work towards the shared goal of help­ing ALL people in need. Based on 150 items from the British Red Cross Museum and Archives, the exhibition celebrates the charity’s history of connecting human kind­ness with human crisis. Readers can admire the bust of Henry Dunant, the Red Cross flag carried during the Franco-Prussian War and a photograph of French female ambulance drivers running to their vehicles. 

Red Cross workers were usually nurses, dressed in their iconic white uniforms, helping the wounded with medicine and sympathy. But the woman in the above photograph was sitting astride a Douglas motor­cycle, in a canvas military coat and heavy boots. She was braced for the dangers that she would have likely met, carrying medical supplies and communications between Red Cross units in WW1.